Managing List Hygiene and Email Deliverability in Mailchimp

MHDG Staff Email Marketing

Mailchimp is a solid choice for any small business getting started with email marketing. It’s got solid integrations and a really friendly price to allow you to start building an audience and communicating with your subscribers without a steep initial time or financial investment. Unfortunately, given how easy Mailchimp is to get started with, many businesses and users dive in and grow their list size, but begin to see their engagement start to shrink and get in over their heads without a proper understanding of how to manage their list hygiene and deliverability.

In our email deliverability consulting, we see a lot of large, unorganized Mailchimp lists, with clients who don’t quite understand how to leverage Mailchimp’s segmentation to their advantage. There are no pre-built segments on account creation, and no pre-built campaign or automation templates to target unengaged contacts for sunsetting or winback campaigns.

Whether you’re just getting started with Mailchimp, or you’re looking to do some list cleaning, here are a few tips and features to take a look at within Mailchimp:

Understanding the Mailchimp Contact Rating

Mailchimp Contact Rating Table

One of the underutilized segmentation attributes of Mailchimp is the Contact Rating (available as a segment condition under the “Subscriber Data” category). Mailchimp uses it’s own algorithm to determine what the level of email engagement a contact has based on what they determine to be the appropriate ratio of opens and clicks to total email sends to that particular contact.

Leveraging this contact rating is a great way to not only manage your unengaged contacts, but also to identify who the subscribers are who are highly engaged. More on that later.

1 Star Contact Rating

There are a few things to note about this Contact Rating. A contact rated 1 star more often than not is ‘Cleaned’ (hard bounced) or Unsubscribed. In some cases however, you may have contacts that are rated 1 star, that are still subscribed. Finding these contacts is a matter of combining two segment conditions:

Make sure you set the segment to match ALL conditions!

In saving and viewing the segment, you’ll see that these contacts are almost all soft bounced, and have no engagement.

2 Star Contact Rating

The 2 star contact rating is a bit trickier. Because Mailchimp doesn’t distinguish between contacts that are new or have limited sends, or contacts that have received a lot of emails but are now dormant, you need to do a bit more to isolate the dormant contacts (we don’t want to run winbacks or sunset brand new contacts!).

There are a few ways to isolate them, and what is best may depend on your unique use case, or a combination of all of the following conditions:

  • Date Added – If you have imported a bunch of contacts, or collected a sizeable amount of email addresses since your last few campaigns, you may be able to leverage this field in combination with the 2 star contact rating to find contacts who are rated 2 stars and have been around a while.
  • Email Marketing Engagement – this condition is a lot like the Contact Rating, except that it distinguishes between ‘new’ and ‘rarely’ based on how long the contact has been in your list (one month). If you email your subscribers often, this is a great way to additionally isolate your 2 star contacts. Be careful though, if you do not email all that frequently, you may incorrectly pull contacts you deem as new. After all, is having only received 1 or 2 emails in the course of a subscriber history and not having opened them truly ‘rarely’ engaged?
  • Campaign Activity (was sent All of the Last 5 Campaigns) – this condition truly isolates contacts that received the last 5 campaigns you sent. Used in combination with the Contact Rating, you’re isolating contacts with confidence. However, you can miss contacts this way if they were excluded from some campaigns (this condition requires that they received ALL 5).

Once you’ve isolated the 2 star contacts accurately, you can then make a judgement call on running a winback campaign (a ‘Hey, are you still interested in hearing from us?’ email) with a strong offer or simply unsubscribing the contacts immediately once you’ve identified them.

3 Star Contact Rating

Managing 3 star contacts is more of an exercise in better segmentation and product/offer tactics than anything else. At this level, a contact should not be suppressed or sent through a winback campaign, but rather, the messaging and offers should be stronger, and they should be excluded from more informational type email communication. An example of this approach can be found as part of our Email Deliverability Rehab Process.

4 & 5 Star Contact Rating

Whatever you’re doing for these contacts, keep doing it. These are your contacts that are regularly engaging with your email content.

Furthermore, further export and segment these contacts to understand what they have in common, what their demographics and purchase behavior is like, and whatever other attributes you can draw commonality from.

While every email marketing situation is different and the frequency, offer value, and available fields to segment may vary, leveraging the Mailchimp Contact Rating and Email Engagement in combination with other segment conditions will allow you to stay on top of your deliverability and in some cases save some money on your subscription by cleaning your unengaged subscribers.

Need help managing your own email deliverability and leveraging Mailchimp (or another tool) to manage your contact database? Contact MHDG to chat about an email deliverability audit and consultation.

Let’s chat.